We have an existing and quite inexpensive container ship network. Is this rail project going to be cheaper than that?

Container ships are cheaper than rail. Their disadvantage is the labor-intensive step of loading and unloading the containers to/from the ship. For a couple hour trip across the English Channel, the loading/unloading cost is disproportionately large compared to the transport cost of the ship, so it makes economic sense to replace it with a tunnel or bridge.

But for cargo across the Pacific, the loading/unloading cost is roughly on par with the fuel cost. So based on the link, even if you doubled the cost per mile, container ships would still be price-competitive with rail. So there's no economic benefit to be gained by shipping goods from China to the U.S. by rail over a Russia-Alaska bridge. Add in the cost to build the bridge and it'll actually be more expensive than container ship. The only advantages you'll get are reduced transport time (from about a month to a week), and the ability to send containers directly by rail to more destinations than just port cities.

Yes, that's the double-edged sword here. If they're a common carrier, they fall under net neutrality but are shielded from liability for the content they carry. If they're an information service, then they are not subject to net neutrality, but are liable for the information they claim they are disseminating.

The ISPs are trying to have their cake and eat it too - be classified as an information service so they are not subject to net neutrality, but not be liable for for the information they're transmitting. You can't have it both ways - pick one or the other. At some point the light bulb will go off in their heads and they'll realize one way means possibly billions of dollars in new liability every year, while the other just means a slightly weaker business model that really isn't a weakness at all if every ISP has to abide by it. (What would be fun would be to classify just the ISPs claiming to be an "information service" as an information service, and make them liable for everything they're transmitting, while competing ISPs who abide by net neutrality are not liable.

Me, I want Android to return the ability to selectively turn off stuff that apps can do. If your app keels over because I won't let it access my contacts, I don't want your fucking app.

If your phone is rooted, you want xprivacy (requires xposed). It lets you selectively control what info apps can access, plus it'll feed fake info to the app which refuses to run if you don't let it view your contacts or location or whatever. Works with Android 4.x, requires the alpha version of xposed for Lollipop.

If I have to spend even 5 minutes looking up gas prices and driving out of my way to go to a cheaper gas station, it's not worth saving 30 cents a gallon on gas. [...] Maybe my 11 gallon gas tank just isn't big enough for significant savings, but I really wonder whether these gas price apps are worth it.

If you get 30 MPG and drive 12000 miles/yr, a 30 cents/gallon savings works out to $120 over a year.

But it's pretty pointless to find a new station every fill-up or to drive too far out of the way to get a lower price - the time you waste is usually not worth it. What it's good for is to get an idea what the average gas prices are so you know if a station is regularly priced high or low, and to find a station that's consistently low-priced in the area you normally drive around. That way you can just go to that station most of the time instead of having to constantly check prices. But you can do all that via their website. I downloaded the app for my phone, and immediately uninstalled it when it demanded I create an account before I could use it.

My local Costco regularly has 20 minute lines of drivers waiting to buy cheaper gas (though it's possible that one family member is shopping and the other is waiting for gas). If I see a line at my preferred gas station, I'll use the one down the street that I know is 15 cents more expensive.

You should only wait in the Costco line if you're waiting while a family member shops, or if it's nearby and you need gas that day and have time to waste. Most Costco gas stations are open a few hours after the store closes. If you go there an hour or a half hour before they close gas service (usually around 9-11pm), there's no line.

The amount of land isn't as important as the location. The land gives the country an exclusive economic zone which extends 200 nm out from the land. When claims by neighboring land conflicts, if the countries can't come to a mutual agreement the line is usually drawn equidistant from the nearest land . That's whay the line for the territorial waters between the U.S. and Mexico angles slightly north of the U.S.-Mexico border (the nearby Coronado Islands just offshore belong to Mexico), before angling sharply south (San Clemente Island further offshore belongs to the U.S.).

Countries cannot restrict passage through the exclusive economic zone, but they can regulate economic activity that occurs there - mainly fishing and mining (oil drilling). So islands in the right location are a big deal. The Japanese spent millions setting up a breakwater around a couple rocks because they were Japanese land and gave them exclusive fishing rights to over a hundred thousand square miles of ocean. The rocks were in danger of collapsing into the sea from wave erosion.

To qualify as land, it has to remain above sea level at high tide. Dumping sand atop underwater corals to create islands isn't generally recognized as legitimate land despite China's claims to the contrary, and would establish a very bad precedent if it were allowed. If that's the way China wants to play, the U.S. could in theory build a new island just off of mainland China and take away a huge swath of ocean territory from China. That's a can of worms you don't want to open. That's why the U.S. has been very clear in stressing that it doesn't recognize this as a legitimate "island," to the point of flying navy aircraft right over it.

* Because destruction free techniques like laser ablation are base on high local fields

* because a 1ps pulse spreads over 10^12 Hz bandwidth, which may be useful if you want to have "more white" light (but this pulse is actually not very short)

* because pump-probe techniques depend on short pulses. If you additionally need a strong pulse, higher power may come in handy

* I also imagine it could be an advantage for generating plasma.

That was the true purpose of Solitaire and Minesweeper. They taught the differences between clicking, right-clicking, double-clicking, and click and drag.

My recollection differs. Games were slower under Windows than DOS due to the overhead, and they definitely still crashed. You didn't have to have boot disks with "gaming" configurations to free up enough low memory, though.

The Apple Menu inverts the Windows paradigm. Your Mac's desktop lists the apps installed in the filesystem (in fact the desktop is pretty much the root of the filesystem), the Apple Menu has your shortcuts. Whereas in Windows your desktop has your shortcuts, and the Start menu lists the apps installed in the filesystem.

This is a consequence of how the two OSes started out. MacOS was coded from the start as a GUI, so logically the desktop is the root of your filesystem. Windows was originally a shell running on DOS. So all your files were stored in the DOS filesystem, and originally the desktop just had shortcuts to your program and data files. (OS X complicated this somewhat since it is now a GUI running on top of a modified version of BSD Unix.)

Anti-Microsoft, pro-Google, and no stated reason for faith in one "doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data" while the other, apparently, will not.

I own my own domain and I give each service I sign up for a unique contact email alias, which forwards to my real email address (currently I have just shy of 500 aliases). I have never received spam at google@mydomain.com. In fact the vast majority of my email aliases receive no spam, indicating the vast majority of online companies are in fact keeping your private info private (at least not without anonymizing it). Contrary to what seems to be the general belief here.

The two major exceptions have been microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com. Those two companies clearly sold my email address to marketers and spammers.

If you look at the currents in the Indian Ocean, and trace backwards from Reunion (it and Mauritius are the two dots east of Madagascar), you pass right through the area they've been searching off of Australia.

The penchant is to pee into corners, since that provides some privacy and reduces your likelihood of being seen. If you can make the walls bounce a urine stream, those two walls at 90 degrees work like a partial retroreflector. Regardless of what angle you hit the first surface, any urine sprayed at them is directed back towards the source (just not vertically, which wouldn't happen anyway due to gravity), .

The key isn't the batteries. The Tesla battery pack is over a thousand pounds, making the Tesla S weigh as much as a SUV. That hasn't hindered it. The key is recharging the battery. The current 30-minute minimum charge time is the primary hindrance to wide-scale adoption (purchase price is too, but I'm pretty sure the government would offer incentives to get us off of oil imports). If you can get the recharge time down to 5 minutes (whether by better charging technology or simply swapping battery packs), then most people's apprehension over having an electric as their only car disappears. Right now, unless you drive very little or are incredibly conscientious about the environment, only people who can afford 2+ cars are getting EVs.

The other problem is going to be operating cost. EV advocates are doing rosy predictions based on current electricity prices, or even current overnight electricity prices. If EVs become mass-market, the huge number of them being charged overnight will flatten out the electrical consumption curve and the overnight prices will no longer be much lower than daytime prices. And if it leaks over into higher consumption during the day, overall electricity prices are going to increase as well. This is going to impact the price of everything that uses electricity, not just operating EVs. Normally the market would simply build more power plants in response, but the same people advocating EVs are blocking the most effective ways to generate power. They insist that new power generation be wind whose inconsistency would require a massive overhaul of our electrical system, or solar whose price would make the EV about the same cost to operate as a gas vehicle.

Ah, you're simply insane, or trolling. Call literally any surgery residency program and ask how it works in the real world.

And the first grafts for aneurysm repair were hand-sewn by DeBakey's wife, but in the intervening fifty years the process has changed. You want to tell old stories, heard secondhand, go right ahead - but tell them that way, not as "current practice".